An mHealth Platform for Supporting Clinical Data Integration into Augmentative and Alternative Communication Service Delivery: User-Centered Design and Usability Evaluation

Abstract

BackgroundThe recent trend of increasing health care costs in the United States is likely not sustainable. To make health care more economically sustainable, attention must be directed toward improving the quality while simultaneously reducing the cost of health care. One of the recommended approaches to provide better care at a lower cost is to develop high-quality data collection and reporting systems, which support health care professionals in making optimal clinical decisions based on solid, extensive evidence.ObjectiveThe objective of this project was to develop an integrated mobile health Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) platform consisting of an AAC mobile app and a Web-based clinician portal for supporting evidence-based clinical service delivery.MethodsA questionnaire and interviews were used to collect clinicians’ ideas regarding what constitutes their desired “clinically relevant” data. In response, a Web-based portal was designed by combining mobile and Web technologies with an AAC intervention to create an integrated platform for supporting data collection, integration, and reporting. Finally, a usability study was conducted with health care professionals.ResultsA Web-based portal was created and integrated with a tablet-based AAC mobile app and data analysis procedures. In the usability study, all participants agreed that the integrated platform provided the ability to collect comprehensive clinical evidence, automatically analyze collected data in real time, and generate clinically relevant performance measures through an easily accessible Web-based portal.ConclusionsThe integrated platform offers a better approach for clinical data reporting and analytics. Additionally, the platform streamlines the workflow of AAC clinical service delivery.

Clinician's Perceptions and Expectations on a mHealth Platform for Supporting Patient Data Integration and Clinical Service Delivery: A Case Study in Evidence-Based Communication Rehabilitation

“…In this section, the results from the interview study, the survey study, and a brief summary of the system evaluation are provided. Extensive details of the system evaluation studies go beyond the scope of this article and are described in [22,25] and one manuscript currently in preparation.…”

“…Therefore, when this approach is used, SLPs do not know their clients' most recent performance in communication when they see their clients in the clinic. Because this report generation process is manual and time-consuming, and the information is always delayed, a number of SLPs choose not to download and process the language samples collected by the dedicated AAC devices [22].…”

“…This approach is more convenient than the previous approach, however, SLPs still can only access the reports when the clients are visiting their clinic (view on the app) or specifically request the clients to email the reports to them. To make the situation even more cumbersome, the data items in those reports are often not exactly what SLPs are most interested in because the designers of those AAC apps are not researchers and therefore, did not seek the input from SLPs when they created the apps [22].…”

“…This paper provides a description of the first three stages of our mHealth platform development and evaluation, with extensive details on the first stage: requirement analysis. The second and third stages are described briefly in this article and further details are provided in other places [22,25].…”

Provider Preferences for Patient-Generated Health Data Displays in Pediatric Asthma: A Participatory Design Approach

“… 44 The PSSUQ instrument was modified to remove items that were not relevant to the prototype display. 45 To supplement the remaining nine PSSUQ items, we added one intention-to-use item with responses on a Likert-type scale (1 = strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree ). We administered the questionnaire for each display in each cycle using Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap).…”